


angels with their great handshakes

by slybrunette



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-16
Updated: 2011-03-16
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:05:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>five times they remember george.</p>
            </blockquote>





	angels with their great handshakes

**i.**

It’s late, a Tuesday, with the television casting everything in blue shadow.

Her knees are drawn to her chest, cuffs of her jeans turned up, and the air conditioner broke yesterday morning with the August sun overhead. Alex keeps his body as far away from hers as possible while remaining on the same couch, remote control in hand as he flips through channels.

There’s a James Bond marathon and a three second delay between the recognition of that fact and his finger on the ‘channel up’ button. He looks sideways at her, to check and see if she saw it, if she saw him falter. If she got it. _007._

Meredith keeps her head down, keeps her eyes on the well-worn novel cradled in her lap. Swallows and tries not to taste bile.

 

 

-

 

 

 **ii.**

There’s a school project, third grade, and construction paper cutouts on her kitchen table for three straight days. Family trees and name origins and Tuck is so innocent when he asks where his middle name came from.

William after her father. His nickname after his own. George hangs there, in the air between them, and it makes sense that he’d expect there to be a connection to someone. Her boy is smart.

Miranda can’t quite get the words out.

 

 

-

 

 

 **iii.**

On her fourth move, when she tears apart her small apartment in Tacoma and decides that moving across the country might finally force her to give up the ghost, she finds one of his old sweaters. Brown and soft, and she remembers him wearing it that last Thanksgiving they were all together.

Izzie wants it to smell like him but instead it smells of pumpkin pie and traces of her perfume, too much time spent packed away with her winter clothes.

Another thing lost.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 **iv.**

Her baby has a birthmark on his knee, the one thing marring otherwise unblemished skin.

If Callie looks at it wrong, if she doesn’t stop and remember to focus, the irregular edges distort and it’s the state of Texas that she’s staring at, a hand instead of a knee.

They say these things fade, with time.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 **v.**

Meredith’s dad kicks it and Cristina finds herself welcoming two more people to the Dead Dad’s Club.

Lexie cries in her funeral clothes and Meredith chokes down enough tequila for all three of them, and she can’t stop thinking about that night out in front of the hospital, when the breeze wouldn’t let up and the rain made her shoes squeak against the linoleum when she went back inside.

She can’t stop thinking of the sense of loss that radiated off of him in waves and how that might have been the one time she can truly say that she looked George in the eye and understood him.


End file.
